Paul W. Bryant Jr.'s business success as entrenched as his family's name

Sunday

Nov 17, 2013 at 4:00 AM

Paul W. Bryant Jr. was running a minor league baseball team before he was 25 years old.He started a bank before he turned 30. The 68-year-old son of late football coaching legend “Bear” Bryant has had successful business ventures in everything from catfish farming to concrete, from dog tracks to casinos and from banks to reinsurance.

By Tommy DeasExecutive Sports Editor | The Tuscaloosa News

Paul W. Bryant Jr. was running a minor league baseball team before he was 25 years old.He started a bank before he turned 30.The 68-year-old son of late football coaching legend “Bear” Bryant has had successful business ventures in everything from catfish farming to concrete, from dog tracks to casinos and from banks to reinsurance.“I've had some different ones not work, too,” Bryant said recently in a rare and revealing interview.Bryant, a member of the University of Alabama board of trustees since 2000 and president pro tempore of the board since 2011, said his business secret as president of Greene Group, a privately-held holding company, has more to do with being able to identify profitable enterprises.“I'm probably better evaluating them than running them, I'll say that,” he said. “I'm a pretty good risk-taker, I guess. I'm not much better than other people, but the timing might have been good on some things.”While his portfolio seems diverse, Bryant sees a common thread in some of his most successful undertakings: banking, gaming and reinsurance (basically insurance for insurance companies) are all highly regulated.“If you've been in that, you get looked at close so it helps to do OK in one regulated business — you get another one,” he said. “They know you've been vetted pretty well.”Bryant realizes his business career got off to a quick start, and that his family ties were an asset.“I had a little head start on my friends because I didn't get put in the service when I graduated, and a lot of them did that and went on to law school and to graduate school,” he said. “I didn't do either of those. I had a four- or five- or six-year head start on them.“Obviously, I had an advantage in that I had met a lot of business people through my parents when I was in high school and college, in the state and out of state. I had a lot of help starting out.”Bryant, who was born in Birmingham when his mother was living there with her parents while his father was serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, is a 1966 graduate of UA with a degree in finance. His first job was as general manager of the Birmingham A's of the Southern League.“He was working for Charlie Finley, who was a Birmingham native who had made a gazillion dollars in pharmaceuticals and became quite a character in baseball,” said Kirk McNair, who was a sports writer in Birmingham at the time, and who became a longtime Bryant family friend.In his late 20s, Bryant helped organize Peoples Bank of Tuscaloosa, which was merged into AmSouth in the early 1980s, with AmSouth later merging with Regions Bank.Bryant moved on to other business interests, keeping a close-knit group of partners in late attorney and civic leader Sam Phelps and his son, Scott, along with veterinarian Wayne May.Bryant's net worth is not public knowledge, but he has amassed enough wealth to donate tens of millions of dollars to the UA. Neither his wealth nor his legacy as the son of the man who retired as college football's all-time winningest coach, however, has inclined him to lead a public life.“He doesn't seek the limelight, that's for sure,” said McNair, who served as sports information director at UA under “Bear” Bryant and who now publishes Bama Magazine. “He's out having lunch and out doing business, so (to say he is a) recluse is maybe a little too strong, but he has certainly guarded his private life as well as anyone could with that name and with the things he has done.”What makes Bryant so private?“What I would suspect, and it's only a suspicion, but I think he wouldn't want people to think he was trading on his father's name. I think he wanted to be his own man,” McNair said.Bryant's first high-profile public venture, joining the UA board of trustees, was controversial. When then-Gov. Don Siegelman moved in 2000 to have Bryant considered for the board, some legislators protested, saying the vacant seat had been promised to be filled by an alumnus of the UA system's Birmingham campus, UAB. Also, members of the 27-member Black Legislative Caucus unanimously passed a resolution in opposition to Bryant's appointment, saying he was insensitive to minorities because of comments attributed to him in a 1989 Esquire magazine profile.The magazine quoted Bryant, who owned GreeneTrack in Greene County at the time, as saying that the dog track was frequented by “low-class, welfare blacks.”Bryant said that he never made the remarks and that the entire article was fabricated. He said he asked Esquire for a retraction, but William M. Adler, the freelance writer of the article, said he stood by the story.Bryant said he was invited by the board members to fill the vacant seat.“I wasn't really seeking it,” he said. “The history of it kind of came up with lobbyists who worked for UAB at the time, some other people opposing my being on the board and it got to be kind of, sort of, a fight.”Bryant said he was urged by the UA alumni association, ex-presidents of the school, members of the A-Club (made up of former UA athletic letter winners) and alumni to seek the seat on the board. With the nomination tied up in the Legislature, trustee Frank Bromberg decided to resign, which allowed Bryant to fill the sixth district slot in April 2000.“I didn't want it to be (a fight), but I felt some responsibility,” Bryant said.The board elected Bryant president pro tempore in September 2011.“It's been a good experience and I've made a lot of very close friends on the board,” he said.Robert Witt has worked with Bryant for the last 10 years, first as UA president and more recently as chancellor of the UA system.“Paul Bryant's dedicated service and leadership have been invaluable to the board of trustees and to the University of Alabama System,” Witt said. “Simply stated, Paul Bryant cares deeply for the university.”Bryant also has a keen interest in the Civil War, and serves as chairman emeritus of the Civil War Preservation Trust, a national historic battlefield preservation organization.“I think that's one reason,” McNair said, “that he has put so much money (in the form of donations) into museums at the university.”In 2005, Bryant founded Bryant Bank, which he calls “my winding-down project.”Bryant said that purpose in starting the bank was to create a community bank like the ones that existed in Tuscaloosa when he was younger.“Our bank that we've got now,” he said, “we started to try to be in communities where my family lives and will live and have it kind of be a legacy thing to be involved in the community stuff that your community banks do.“It's the only time we've put our name on anything. We thought we'd do that for the grandchildren and stuff, and there's some responsibility that goes with that, I guess.”In 2012, Bryant Bank was awarded the Revitalizing Your Community Award by the American Bankers Association, in large part for the bank's work after the April 27, 2011, tornado that devastated the community.“We probably don't pump that as much as we should,” Bryant said, “but we're real proud of that.“Without sounding too hokey, that's why we started the bank.”Bryant is a family man: He has been married to his wife, Cherry, since 1966, and they have three daughters — all UA graduates — and three grandchildren.The extended family includes about a dozen hunting dogs, who are kept at Bryant's farm in Greene County. The farm spans hundreds of acres and has catfish farms, cattle and grounds for quail hunting.“I spend virtually all my time in Greene County,” Bryant said. “That's what I like when I've got a chance to get away.”The bird dogs are German shorthaired pointers and English pointers. Bryant has also had a couple of Labrador retrievers, but they passed away last year.“My passion is the dogs, really,” he said. “I enjoy those, have a lot of them around the house. I'm not as big on killing stuff as I am finding it with the dogs.“A lot of them we've got don't hunt because they're older. They are retired ones that mostly just get loving, pets.”